Wednesday, July 24, 2013

COME ALONG, WE'RE GOING TO THE TRANS-LUX TO HISS WILLIAM BUCKLEY.

Jay Nordlinger, who practices what at National Review passes for whimsy, tells us (as he has apparently done before) that hissing is for commies:

Speaking of longstanding complaints: I have always objected to hissing. And, all of my life, the Left has hissed. They’ve hissed movies, plays, music, me — anything they don’t like. I’m sure that conservatives have hissed, along the way. Frankly, I have never been present for this.

Liberals also loudly unwrap candy at the opera, I'm told.

Believe it or don't, this is not the craziest thing that went out under Nordlinger's name today. Here's a letter he says he received:

My girlfriend works at a retail clothing store in Chicago. She has recently had some issues with her manager (long stories, details don’t matter).

Today, she was told by the manager, “Because you do such a good job selling, the other employees are intimidated. They are intimidated by your success. We want to move you to a fitting room [outta sight, outta mind], so other employees have a chance on the floor. I just want to have an environment where all people are equal and everybody does the same.”

She has already found another job, and is leaving. By the way, the store called her into a meeting a few months ago and told her, “Employees said that, in the breakroom, you mentioned having a Bush-Cheney shirt. Some of them thought that was offensive, so we would like you not to speak of it at work.”

Astonishingly, Nordlinger seems to buy this ridiculous story of a retail business where the manager doesn't want a super-salesman on the selling floor because liberal fascism: "We can accept this kind of country — just accept defeat, or a kind of dhimmitude," he sighs. "Or we can push back. Push back in myriad ways, at myriad turns." He doesn't name the letter's author; Heywood Jablome, I'm guessing; sounds like his work.

And then someone sends him another Penthouse Letter, which he also buys:

Here’s some pushback for you. Someone on my team once complained to my boss that I had weighty books on my desk, which intimidated her. It made her reluctant to ask me questions. (She was reluctant, all right, but for different reasons.) The boss asked me to keep my books in a drawer, rather than on the desk itself. I adamantly refused, and challenged my boss to fire me for my refusal.

I've half a mind to send him a letter about how my liberal boss was intimidated because I have such a big dick.

Conservatives love to play out this little fantasy that liberals are routinely living out their policies on a micro scale. Presumably this is because conservatives view politics as a moral endeavor, one which, to use the cliche, begins at home. They champion the proud, upstanding, square-jawed middle-class white man, and then imagine that successful politics simply involve taking that man and multiplying him by 300 million. Then America will be a glorious, God-fearing land that always wins its wars and where you can spend a week in the big city without meeting any minorities.

The notion that the way I should best live my life and the way the federal government should best run this country are two very different things is all filthy leftist moral relativism.

Please send that letter.I'll send one about how I once had a conservative boss, whom I referred to (behind his back, of course) as "the whitest man in America" who bought into every Fox News trope about there being a "war" on Christmas and etc. He - a man in his late 40s - early 50s - routinely came to work wearing a polo with a sweater tied around his neck by the arms, frat-boy style, and I often fantasized about grabbing the ends of the sweater arms and pulling them tight...tighter...tighter...every time he would bloviate on the latest talking points from Bullshit Mountain.

Today, she was told by the manager, “Because you do such a good job selling, the other employees are intimidated. They are intimidated by your success. We want to move you to a fitting room [outta sight, outta mind], so other employees have a chance on the floor. I just want to have an environment where all people are equal and everybody does the same.”

The stories are pure bullshit of course, but one of the ironies is that employers in nearly all states are quite free to (1) tell their employees to not discuss politics in the workplace and (2) tell their employees how to keep their workplaces organized. If these rubes actually believed in or even understood the free market. they wouldn't venture into these areas when they are writing their fantasy material.

As for the guy challenging his boss to fire him, I call 100% unadulterated bullshit. First of all, they weren't weighty books, they were jism-stained copies of Guns and Ammo. Second, he put them away immediately and peed his pants. Third, he only thought of his brave retort years later. Fourth, he's still working at the same place, or lost the job years ago and has been on the dole ever since.

When people tell me stories like this I as for real names - no hiding behind anonymity. If Nordlinger's girlfriend is leaving the job name the retail establishment. He can't because the story never happened. If he names a real place he risks the management there calling BS on him.

Those weighty books would have to be _Atlas Shrugged_, _The Fountainhead_, and _Battlefield Earth_. They are some real door stoppers.They also tell anyone approaching them with a question that they are probably wasting their time.

"It made her reluctant to ask me questions. (She was reluctant, all right, but for different reasons.)"

Jeeze, I wonder what other reasons a co-worker might have for being reluctant to ask questions of the kind of asshole who is proud that he intimidates his colleagues and challenges the poor mook who has to write his performance report.

I've half a mind to send him a letter about how my liberal boss was intimidated because I have such a big dick.

That was my first thought, too. But then again, what victory is there to be gained from fooling a man so gullible that he believes that a salesperson was fired for making too much money for her employer?

Nice effort, amateur, but if you really want Jay Nordlinger's love and admiration (and who wouldn't?!) you need to throw something in there about Boss Fake-O saying "I'm just supporting Obama's demands that people with talent and ambition be brought down a peg, for the good of the state. We all have to make sacrifices." Now that's what I call an anecdatum!

Come on, National Review is full of whimsy! I mean, not intentionally, but still. What could be more whimsical than Michael Ledeen calling for the forced sterilization of all liberals, K-Lo objecting because some fetuses might get caught in the crossfire, and J-Gold stepping in to say they both present good points and the real answer is that there is no answer, then signing off to go take a nap? The whole thing is like a comedy of manners playing out in real time.

It was after some first-hand episodes with youngAfrican-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. Theadvice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When Iwas a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males oncetried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On asecond occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I wason it .Once, a tall young black male ripped a basketball from my hands anddrove to the hoop, very nearly elbowing the glasses from my face in theprocess. I think a young black man stole my chainsaw because he would have tohave been fleet of foot. National Review has had to let several fine men gobecause of things they said about young black men. I could cite three more examples thatmore or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a youngerJesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warningsprepared to pass on to his own future children.

Speaking of longstanding complaints: I have always objected to hissing. And, all of my life, the Left has hissed. They’ve hissed movies, plays, music, me — anything they don’t like. I’m sure that conservatives have hissed, along the way. Frankly, I have never been present for this.

Yesterday, while completing my daily P90X routine on the roof of my Manhattan brownstone, I noticed that there was a day-care center on fire several blocks away. Avoiding getting swamped in moral relativism, I leaped into action right away, and saved, by my count, 57 toddlers from burning to a crisp. However, Hillary Clinton then drove up in her taxpayer-funded mobile abortionplex, and said that the risk of some of those babies growing up to become successful businessmen was too great, so she threw them all back in. The white ones anyway. The black ones got Obamaphones and bottles of purple drank. I tell ya, I've just about had enough of this. I'm this close from selling my place and moving to a coal town in rural Kentucky.

"Look, all I'm saying is, people repeatedly tell me how confrontational you make even the most ordinary interactions. Maybe take tomorrow off, okay? Go fishing? You're a smart guy and you do a good job, but it's a problem for me when everyone else in the department spends time calculating ways to avoid you. So! Clean up your desk before you go home, and come in Monday like it's a fresh start. Sound good?" -- what the boss probably said right before this guy adamantly refused and issued his challenge.

Not a chance, the New Testament has all that "turn the other cheek" and "it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle" commie shit. It's all Leviticus for these mooks.

Probably the boos had the staff rotating between tasks on a regular schedule. Miss "Imthe Best Saleswoman" thought she should be exempt from policing the fitting rooms, or returning stock to the racks, re-folding crumpled t-shirts, etc. because she made one or two more sales than the other workers.

i'll say it's bullshit; nordlinger totally cut out the part where i had sex with my salesgal girlfriend and a hot milf who just so happened to be in the store and was incredibly aroused by her bush/cheney tee.

My lecture will go something like this: "I got punched by a black guy who was trying to take my wallet. The other thousands of black people I've met or passed or otherwise encountered while living in a major American city were either nice, neutral, or just didn't notice me.

"By the way, son, if you see a class offered by a professor named Victor Davis Hanson, don't take it. That guy seems like a shithead."

REAL murkins yell when they're displeased, and they take every opportunity to work in racial slurs.

In one of his books P.J. O'Rourke once complained about the so-called "new noise," which was a tsk sound immediately followed by a hiss. I think I heard it at college maybe twice *mumble* years ago but that was about it.

Hey wait a minute! What about laissez faire? What about "right to work" (ie employment at will)? If gf of NR writer doesn't like her job, her boss, the policies, and so on, why doesn't she just quit and, like a good little Ayn Rand heroine, start her own company and engage in some creative destruction? Surely, a business which, in the immortal words of Rush in "The Trees," tries to cut down the oaks to the size of the maples in the name of equality, should be ripe for the picking. Instead of whining about it to her bf, and him whining about it to all and sundry, why don't the two of them get off their duffs, stop working for others, and act like real believers in capitalism by forming their own business? They could easily put these believers in equality out of business and live happily ever after, each according to their no doubt outstanding abilities without having to ever worry about the needs of others.

(But no need to drag Rush into it. I read that Neal Peart now views his objectivist days as an embarrassment, and also that when he wrote 'The Trees', he was totally stoned and any political overtones were entirely by accident.)

Oh, I think there's just a bit of shading of the truth here. I can envision her boss saying, "I have got to get this right-wing moron off the floor before we end up bankrupt. She's driving away customers faster than I could with a fucking stick. I can't fire her because the first time I warned her about being non-political and non-religious with customers, she threatened me with a retaliatory suit. If it's not Ayn Rand, it's baby killers and Communists and fucking fluoridation, for gawd's sake. Why can't she just sell the fucking brassieres?"

Yeah, it's always easier to talk about running your own business than actually doing it.On the second point, no can do. The politics are clear, and being stoned is no excuse. If anything, being stoned should have expanded Mr. Peart's consciousness to the point where he could see past the objectivist BS he had bought into when he was straight.

Well, OK, but four years after The Trees he was writing songs like 'Territories' and 'The Big Money', so either he turned commie in four years, or else it kind of doesn't matter. I'll go with the second.

It's tough being a lefty Rush fan. Everyone wants to trash 'em because they've got a reputation as Ayn Rand's house band, even though only a few of the lyrics bear it out. It's good music! I'd rather listen to that than 60's folk or anti-Thatcher punk rock or whatever else qualifies as music for lefties.

She has recently had some issues with her manager (long stories, details don’t matter).

"And so I says to my manager, I says, 'OK, I did tell the bla--excuse me, the quote-endquote African-American *snort* customer that she shouldn't wear dark clothing because nobody will be able to see her at night, but I went LOL j/k and told her that I was just worried about her safety and my auto insurance premiums! Those people just can't take a joke, you know? Hey, while we're talking, let's talk races, I mean raises--oh, now what?' Maybe it was because she was Hispanic--oh, excuse me again, Latina?"

"Well, Jay, I was in the supermarket the other day, and there was this, uh, well, you know, ahead of me, and he was buying these big, thick steaks, and potato chips and onion dip (the good kind) and five big bottles of Mountain Dew with his EBT card, and you know what that means, of course.

"And when he paid for it all (well, what am I saying, we paid for it all), he tried to sell some crack to the clerk. Well, Jay, this was just going too far, I said to myself, and I got out my phone and I dialed 911. And, just as I did, the store manager ran over and yanked the phone out of my hand so hard it hurt and screamed at me that I was engaging in racial profiling and he wouldn't tolerate that kind of behavior in his store and that I should just take my business elsewhere and he got spit on me and now I might need surgery on my pinkie and the worst part was that the, uh, you know, just grinned at me just like Obama does when he thinks he's being funny. That Mr. Zimmerman was right. They always get away with everything."

Oh my god - I apologize if someone else has already implored, BEGGED, really, but DOITDOITDOITDOIT! You've got the chops, man, you KNOW you could do it convincingly. Please PLEASE, we don't ask for much, your humble readers, but seriously, just do it.Thanks in advance.

You left out the best part where you "saved" a family who had locked themselves out of their SUV---and then REFUSED TO APPEAR IN A COMMERCIAL FOR ME BECAUSE THEY WERE AFRAID THE LIBRUHLS WOULD CUT THEIR HEADS OFF!!!!!

The reason this rare sound of "taking" disapproval seems to be EVERYWHERE to blowhards and pseudo-intellectual assholes like O'Rourke, et al, is that it hurts them where it counts--their over-inflated egos.

A reaction of shouting and throwing things (the typical wingnut show of displeasure) is what they are after with their provocations. They love to get people spitting angry and jumping around like Yosemite Sam.

What they absolutely cannot tolerate is the reaction of 'tsking' them like disappointed adults to misbehaving children.

Agreed. I can take or leave Rush, but I recognize talent and craftsmanship to some degree. Even if they are politically deranged (arguable) Randists, those people have so few with actual talent that we should take pity and recognize them.

one of the ironies is that employers in nearly all states are quite free to (1) tell their employees to not discuss politics in the workplace and (2) tell their employees how to keep their workplaces organized.

Another is that they'd scream bloody murder were the shoe on the other foot. I mean JESUS, how many heroic tales of complaining about liberal coworkers' liberalism have we heard?

“Because you do such a good job selling, the other employees are intimidated. They are intimidated by your success. We want to move you to a fitting room [outta sight, outta mind], so other employees have a chance on the floor.

I think the story here is that Girlfriend is poaching on other salesperson's customers for the commission.

This all sounds like the Hollywood conservatives who can't find work because of liberal blacklisting, rather than lack of talent. "They hate me because I'm so much better than they are." If there's anything to the story it's probably because she was lousy, but couldn't accept that.

This. "Because you do such a good job selling" is maniac-maintenance speak for, "Look, I don't want (another) confrontation that everyone, including the customers, can hear. Let's just say you're *too good* and give others--who are your inferiors--a chance. Okay?"

I heard Geddy Lee's (your namesake) voice once and ran off screaming. As a drummer I've been under the impresh that Peart is one of the greats, but I saw him on a Letterman Drum Solo week perf and he SUCKED, man.

And, all of my life, the Left has hissed. They’ve hissed movies, plays, music, me — anything they don’t like.

I can say this ten times a day, but it is still true: I have sat in meetings, organized, petitioned, gotten drunk with, and made love to people on "the Left" my entire adult life, and I have never, EVER seen the kind of people and behavior that these assholes on the Right talk about.

"The Left" that they hate so much are just figments of their imagination.

By the way, the store called her into a meeting a few months ago and told her, “Employees said that, in the breakroom, you mentioned having a Bush-Cheney shirt. Some of them thought that was offensive, so we would like you not to speak of it at work.”

So he thinks she was punished for being conservative, when the fact is, she was being an asshole for bringing up politics at work.~~~

I'm a Leftist who owns a retail operation. My top commission salesman in the store where I have my office is a hard core Republican. I'd hire two more like him (sales wise, not politics wise) if I could find them.

I just returned from a Philharmonic concert in Central Park. For the life of me I don't know why liberals insist on trying to bring our glorious mono-culture to these multicultural masses. They did all they could to disrupt the experience for appreciative conservatives like myself: cell-phone ringing, loud talking, and of course, the usual fried chicken bones and watermelon rinds were thrown all over. "Support our tropes! Support our tropes!" I bellowed at them. One specimen even spit on a bust of Brahms. Lucky for him the Chateau Merdon '94 had mitigated my ire, or he would have felt the full force of a bourgeois mentality unleashed.

Yeah, their lyrics stink, even on their own terms. Really, I hate everything about them,....the mechanical sounding guitar, the whining, warbling singing voice, the politics (obviously), everything. And now he is blaming it all on pot? Pot should be legal, that is the one part of libertarianism that he should NOT have jettisoned. Instead, he is now using it as a scapegoat for his stupid ass politics.

Yup. The Law in excruciating detail, history, poetry, prophets major and minor, massive bloodletting ... the OT packs in a lot of stuff. The NT, on the other hand, is a few summaries of varying oral traditions, and a grab-bag of personal correspondence. Heck, the Gideons even had to pad their pocket versions with Psalms and Proverbs to cover up how lightweight the New Testament is by itself.

And given some of the popular alternatives nowadays, I'd almost prefer it if people stuck to having New Testaments on their desks, instead of, e.g., How Bible Prophecy Demonstrates That All Muslims Are Murderous Filth Who Must Be Nuked Immediately Once a Christian Is Back in the White House., or Infinite Jest.

The Old Testament is much, much worse, granted, but you can still find justification for just about any horrible act you're inclined to commit in the New Testament as well. Better to do like Jefferson and edit it down to actual quotes from the Jesus character. Better still, edit it down to what New Testament scholars generally agree to be the only possibly historical accurate quotes from the Jesus character. Then you get the Sermon on the Mount and a few words about helping the poor and not much else. Otherwise, violent racism, gay hating, worship the wealthy; it's all on the table.

Alternatively, if early Gentile Christians had actually taken to heart Paul's advice about how it would be best not to marry and have a family, they would probably have made the world a better place ... eventually.

You know what? In Mexico, we have the same problem. Intimidation is a big gun against employees than need the job. I hope goverment make a new law to controlate this type o cases. Here is my job and some fruits

I think we've all seen the chain emails in 2008 and 2012 about the poor business owners who were going to suffer so much under NObama and decided to fire every person with an Obama bumper sticker in response.

. . . "Objection!" shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have committed the murder. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. "With both arms in a sling," he said evenly, "I could have slapped Gregory Fitzhurst to death at ten paces with my mighty dick." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. . . .

I could also see "you're doing too good a job selling" as a mis-transcription of "Honey, it's good that you're enthusiastic and all, but maybe you're coming on a bit TOO strong. I'm going to put you on fitting room duty for a bit and when you come back, try not to corner every customer for five minutes telling them about Ayn Rand. To tell the truth, your rants are starting to intimidate even the other employees."

You ignore the obvious fact that the lone right-winger is a square-jawed creative genius who gets all the work done, so inconveniencing all those other moochers doesn't affect productivity one jot (just a 'jot', 'tittle' being banned by the draconian workplace nanny-state electric Frankenstein 'harassment' policy!).

Fifth, the guy is very probably a proponent of an owner's right to decide what can be allowed on his [usually] property, with refusal to obey being either the immediate prelude to leaving or of the commission of trespassing.

(I don't assume that the stories are pure bullshit---it's a really big country, and there are all kinds of outliers out there---it's just that they don't signify _anything_, it being such a big country...which might in fact be bullshit according to the author of a book of that name, it being 'not even a lie', but I disagree: even if the essence of a bullshitter is their not caring whether a statement were true or not, which is that book's thesis as I understand it, but 'bullshit' as such really does imply making stuff up.)

What will you do for that comment the day after it were especially friendly to you? And will you ever stare wistfully at that comment as it stands in the thread with the other comments, realising what you have taken from it (or will you at least tell the judge that)?

> [...] challenges the poor mook who> has to write his performance report.Uhh, put that way, I like that guy a little, and standing up to any boss might be a first step in standing up to all the bosses.